New ways to view and teach identity and gender

Since the introduction of mass education during the Industrial Revolution, British schools have served as factories that produce disciplined, rational and economically useful minds. Centred on the Vitruvian Man[1] and Cartesian dualism[2], they have privileged white, male, middle class subjectivities and ways of thinking and knowing: the mind, as associated with men, has been deemed superior to the body, as associated with women, or men subjugated by race, class or sexuality (Connell, 1995).

This means that gender norms have been built into the system and, while many schools now contain a mix of boys and girls, this structural and social history means that schools continue to (re)produce an often oppressive cultural hegemony[3], based on essential differences between boys and girls.

The neoliberal form of this hegemony continues to privilege the mind, with its emphasis on market logic and individual competition. Girls outperforming boys in standardised testing - a universal tenet of neoliberal educational models - or increasing numbers of girls entering the traditionally male realm of STEM following sustained encouragement from various forces, has broken down gender stereotypes and opened up opportunities for girls. Yet these changes are often contradicted or limited by the hidden curriculum in classrooms. “The strict heteronormative regulation and policing of gendered and sexualized identities, an everyday experience in schooling, narrowly confine the options of all individuals in terms of how they perform their gendered and sexual subjectivities” (Sedgwick,1990, quoted in Robinson, 2007). Many unconscious lessons are learnt about gender, taught not just by language and subject content but through material forces which remain unacknowledged by most teachers.

Schools need to recognise their part in the construction of these binaries and their concomitant inequalities, realising the importance of deconstructing gender stereotypes and the existence and needs of gender fluidity and identities that do not fit neatly into boxes.

This necessary challenge to phallocentrism (Braidotti, 1994) requires a new approach,

acknowledging that teachers are often complicit in showing life through a neo-liberal, dualistic lens and thus perpetuating the status quo (Strom and Martin, 2013). There is a clear need for self-reflexivity and de-centering which posthumanism, new materialism and affect may offer: posthumanism “refuses to treat human as (1) ontologically given, [and] not the only actor of consequence, and (2) disembodied or autonomous, separate from the world of nature and animality” (Sundberg, 2013: 34). Viewing humans as emerging, in combination with material agents, has the ability to “pierce us like an arrow, to force us to think, and enable us to act in new ways” (Cull, 2014:193). This challenge to teachers’ and pupils’ habitual understandings of the world, specifically gender and power relations and positionality, offers the possibility of daily decentering, constructing a new mode of learning and learner who is more critical, active and engaged with potential material forces.

The PhEmaterialist[4] approach allows teachers to consider bodies and identities as fluid and in a constant state of becoming. It can be difficult for teachers to prioritise social justice issues during a time of a neoliberal focus on results and continued funding cuts; some teachers also consider it the role of isolated, specialised moments such as one off PSHE talks. However, as valuable as these separate lessons are, I would argue that it is the daily challenges to normative thinking that are the most powerful. Giving attention to the material forces at work in the classroom has implications not just for gender norms, but for all intersections and the future of the environment, by “helping students to develop sensory intimacy with their world and counteracting the tendency to de-sensualise and commodify the human relation to reality” (O’Loughlin, 1998: 293). Greater embodiment could allow for greater understanding of bodily relationality and ambiguity, and allow for increased authenticity, agency and inclusivity.

[1] Vitruvian Man: Braidotti explains in The Posthuman that the privileging of the human (and, specifically, the human male) instills a set of “mental, discursive and spiritual values” (2013, 13) which come to form the basis for political policies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. (White) man is understood to function as a kind of vessel for perfect rationality and reason.

[2] Cartesian Dualism is a splitting of the mind and body, as described by Descartes in a thought experiment.

[3] Cultural Hegemony is described by Gramsci as the way in which people are socialised to the dominant way of thinking through institutions such as schools, churches and the media (Gramsci, 1977)

[4] PhEmaterialism is a term coined by Jessica Ringrose et al, combining Posthumanism and

feminist materialism